Natural Wolbachia infections for the control of Anopheles mosquitoes

 描述（由申请人提供）：疟疾通过感染疟原虫的雌性按蚊叮咬传播。这种疾病每年造成近100万人死亡，其中大多数是非洲的孕妇和幼儿。2012年，有2亿人感染疟疾，33亿人面临感染风险。在 由于缺乏有效的疟疾疫苗，通过使用杀虫剂对蚊子媒介进行化学控制仍然是防治疟疾传播的最佳武器。然而，蚊子对杀虫剂的抗药性正在上升，迫切需要控制蚊子种群的新方法。作为疟疾控制的替代工具，已广泛提议使用沃尔巴克氏体内共生体，因为这些细菌感染能够在昆虫种群中迅速传播，并使宿主对包括疟原虫在内的致病病原体的合并感染具有抗性。以前在按蚊物种中寻找这些细菌的努力是不成功的，但是我们最近在西非布基纳法索的几种按蚊的自然种群中发现了一种新的沃尔巴克氏体菌株，我们称之为wAnga。在这个项目中，我们将大大扩展我们对按蚊中这种天然沃尔巴克氏体感染的了解，并将为未来的研究提供一个强大的工具包，旨在评估这些细菌用于疟疾控制的用途。我们将在细胞系中培养wAnga，我们将对细菌基因组进行测序。我们将产生稳定感染的蚊子品系，并将测试潜在由沃尔巴克氏体诱导的关键生殖表型。此外，我们将开发一种快速和特异性的方法，以便于在野外环境中检测受感染的蚊子，这将有助于研究野外蚊子种群中感染的流行和分布。这一极具创新性的提议将开辟一个新的研究领域，并为进一步研究基于内共生体的按蚊病媒控制方法提供了一个难得的机会。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Malaria is transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles mosquitoes that are infected with Plasmodium parasites. This disease kills almost a million people each year, mostly pregnant women and young children in Africa. In 2012 there were 200 million people infected with malaria, and 3.3 billion people were at risk of infection. In the absence of an effective malaria vaccine, chemical control of the mosquito vector through the use of insecticides remains the best weapon to fight malaria transmission. Insecticide resistance in mosquitoes is however on the rise, and novel methods to control mosquito populations are urgently needed. As an alternative tool for malaria control, the use of Wolbachia endosymbionts has been widely proposed as these bacterial infections are able to spread rapidly through insect populations and render hosts resistant to co-infections with disease-causing pathogens, including Plasmodium. Previous efforts to find these bacteria in Anopheles species were unsuccessful, however we recently discovered a novel Wolbachia strain, which we called wAnga, in natural populations of several species of Anopheles mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, West Africa. In this project we will considerably expand our knowledge of this natural Wolbachia infection in Anopheles mosquitoes, and will generate a formidable toolkit for future studies aimed at assessing the use of these bacteria for malaria control. We will culture wAnga in cell lines and we will sequence the bacterial genome. We will generate stably infected mosquito lines and will test key reproductive phenotypes potentially induced by Wolbachia. Moreover, we will develop a rapid and specific method to facilitate detection of infected mosquitoes in field settings that will be instrumental to study the prevalence and distribution of infection in field mosquito populations. This highly innovative proposal will open up a new area of research and offers an exceptional opportunity to further endosymbiont-based vector control methods for Anopheles species.